Data of over 500 million Facebook users leaked online

Details of more than 500 million Facebook users have been leaked and published on a website by hackers. Users’ information across 106 countries has been leaked, reports Business Insider, which includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, and email addresses of the users.

Insider reviewed a sample of the leaked data and verified several records by matching known Facebook users’ phone numbers with the IDs listed in the data set. We also verified records by testing email addresses from the data set in Facebook’s password reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal a user’s phone number.

The leaked data was first discovered by Alon Gal, CTO of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock on Saturday. He informed Insider, “A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts.”

All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free.

This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked.

I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data. https://t.co/ysGCPZm5U3 pic.twitter.com/nM0Fu4GDY8

— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021

According to a Facebook spokesperson, the information is several years old and the flaw was fixed in August 2019. The social media giant has not addressed the new data leak yet.